


Mechanically Inclined

by RecessiveJean



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Backstory, Cars, Childhood, Gen, Mission Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 20:51:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7376923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecessiveJean/pseuds/RecessiveJean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Gaby put her head under a car bonnet, she was not yet six.</p><p>It was almost an accident.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mechanically Inclined

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theoldgods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/gifts).



> I'm sure I have accidentally taken ridiculous liberties with any number of mechanical details, as well as other historical and geographical details. My sincere apologies to anybody who knows better.

The first time Gaby put her head under a car bonnet, she was not yet six.

It was almost an accident. Cars had not been part of the plan that summer; certainly, not part of the plan for Gaby. When Mutti said they were going to stay at a big house in the country, she hadn’t mentioned cars. She spoke only of the other children, the beautiful fields to run in, and the wonderful opportunity that Uncle Rudi had been so kind as to secure for Vater. Dr. Teller would have a chance to work with some very clever, important men and Mutti was so proud of him. On arrival they learned the entirety of a grand home had been given over to their use, those very clever men and their families, so they made the most of it.

There were nine couples altogether, and six of those couples had eight children between them. Gaby was second-youngest, with only a baby below her. Lotte was useless as playmates went, a fat fair blob of a creature just staggering around on round legs. All the mothers declared her cunning and lovely but the rest of the children considered her too small to count for anything yet.

Above Gaby was rather a significant age gap, as the next-oldest boy, Ernst, was eight. Above _him_ were five more, all the way up to August who was twelve (nearly thirteen) and promptly appointed himself their captain. The rest were too in awe of him to argue; August, tall and fair and cursed with overabundant confidence, had that effect on people.

The children ranged all over the house that summer with very little to stop them. Naturally they didn’t go into any of the small groups of rooms set up as apartments for each family; that was as unthinkable as barging into someone’s house. Somebody was also sure to scold if they went into one of two grand sitting areas the wives had set aside for their own use, and of course they were never allowed in the part of the house where the fathers were working. Apart from that, they had free run of the place. They ran races on the front lawn, crawled through the attics and made much of the beautiful toys laid out for their exclusive use in a nursery apartment at the back of the house.

August immediately commandeered all six tin planes and declared they were his private fleet. Any child who wanted to have use of one would need to beat another child at a race on the lawn to earn an afternoon with a plane of August’s choosing. The toy cars he was a bit more generous with, since they had toy cars aplenty, but even a few of those he set aside for his personal use.

Gaby did not have to understand much about cars to know that these were the best. That was just August’s way: take the very best for himself, and leave the rest as a present for the others.

Had she been any older Gaby might have pushed back against this. But at five she was barely allowed to join them in anything really fun, so she knew better than to try her luck at an argument. She was already kept from following them into some parts of the grounds: if it wasn’t races or toys or games on the lawn, they made her go back inside without them, reasoning that she was too little not to be afraid of some games and if she were afraid she might complain to her mother and get everyone in trouble.

The injustice of this burned within her—if _anyone_ was going to get scared and run carrying tales, surely it would be Ernst, who was the most snivelling little coward she had ever met in her life—but she kept it carefully pinned down inside her until one day in mid-July when Gaby won her morning race.

She stood before August, cheeks scarlet with equal parts heat exertion and triumph, and claimed her prize: no plane for her, thank you. She wanted the right to spend a whole day with the group, no matter where they went.

“She can’t!” This was Edith, who was rather too given to absolutes. “She’ll ruin everything.”

Gaby did not say even one of the four things she immediately wanted to say to Edith, and privately viewed this as proof against her own impetuousness. She said only, “but I _want_ to.”

“You won’t like it, Gaby,” August said, though not unkindly. “We will only be in the garage, pretending to be mechanics.”

“I can be a mechanic!” Gaby promised. Then, because she could see that was a little ambitious, amended, “well I can hand you the things you need, can’t I? Tools, and such? _Please_. I did win.”

“Oh yes, against _Ernst_ ,” scoffed Edith. “Might as well have been racing Lotte.”

Ernst, who was knock-kneed and slightly asthmatic, coloured scarlet and put his head down. Gaby would have felt sorry for him if she hadn’t been so consumed by this chance to make herself part of the big group. She stood squarely before a jury of her peers, too proud to beg, too fixated on her prize to back down.

“She did win.” That was Martha, who didn’t say much of anything, ever, but usually managed to make the few things she did say count for a lot. And Gaby _had_ won; even August had to concede the truth of this.

“Very well,” he said, earning a heavy sigh and roll of the eyes from Edith, “but you must do _exactly_ as you are told, you understand?”

“Oh yes,” Gaby vowed, and so they all proceeded in solemn state to the garage, whose lock bore evidence of recent tampering. August pushed the doors wide with a grand flourish, revealing two large grey blobs.

Gaby stood to the side as three children applied themselves to each blob, rolling back the heavy canvas with all the reverence of a priest at the tabernacle to reveal a pair of gleaming motorcars. Gaby, conscious more of the solemnity of the occasion than anything else, still caught her breath at the sight. These were _cars_. Not for these the utilitarian black-beetle carapace of the taxi, nor the square grey army canvas one saw so much of lately. You didn’t have to know anything about cars to see that these were in a class all their own.

One of the pair was a saloon car, all soft pale cream and deep, rich burgundy. The generous sweep of each wheel-well spoke of stately passage along country lanes. Gaby could almost picture a benevolent driver at the wheel and a plump, cheery mother in the back, surrounded by dimpled, laughing children bouncing on the well-sprung seats as they travelled to an amusement of their choice.

The other car was longer, with heavy pipes running along the outer sides of the bonnet. It was this car which August immediately went to stand beside; this car which he had clearly laid special claim to, and Gaby could see why. It was built for speed, low to the ground with a generous bonnet and a pert afterthought of a driver’s seat. The wheels were immense. Gaby could easily imagine the lion’s purr the engine would make when it was turned over. August put the bonnet up like it belonged to him and beckoned Gaby over to look within.

The gunmetal grey and sulky, sooty black of the parts meant nothing to her. They were a foreign language in a country she’d yet to visit. But August gestured for her to bring him a wrench with such assurance that she truly believed he understood everything there was to know about the machine. She handed him every tool he requested and watched narrowly the confidence of his gestures, the way he put the tools to different parts and tweaked and fiddled like he knew exactly what he was about.

She coveted that confidence.

She coveted that car.

That night at supper, vigorously scrubbed of all grease and dirt and made newly presentable in a fresh cotton dress, Gaby announced that when she grew up, she wanted to get a job making cars go.

Her mother looked amused. She set her fork aside as if to speak, but Vater beat her to it. He said only “yes, liebchen. If you wish it” and whatever Mutti had been about to say was, in the end, left unspoken.

 

* * *

 

Gaby did not actually put her hands on a car’s engine again until after the war. By that time Mutti and Vater were both gone, and her every plump baby curve had vanished along with her smile. The Gabriella Teller who was delivered as a foster child to Otto and Maria Schmidt in the summer of 1946 was nothing like the Gabriella Teller of three years before. This was a peaky, pinched girl with large eyes and a small, scared mouth that did not remember how to turn up at the corners.

Maria had immediately taken on the job of finding food to put in the girl, but it was Otto who first put the smile back on her face. She had been with them almost a year when she took his lunch out to the garage and found him cursing the unplanned absence of his apprentice.

“Drunk again, of course,” he said, then seemed to read judgement in her solemn attention, because he cleared his throat awkwardly and pointed at a wrench.

“Er—just put that around the valve then, will you? Good girl.”

She fitted the head in place and haltingly followed his instruction on how to turn it. She was sure she must be doing it wrong, it seemed hardly to budge at all, but Otto put his hand up to stop her without any sign of concern.

“That’s enough,” he said, then turned something on his own side and declared it done.

Gaby didn’t doubt him, exactly, but she did wonder how it could be true. Even so she stood back as directed and watched Otto settle behind the wheel.

To her astonishment, the engine which wheezed and rattled on its arrival now turned over without hesitation and filled every corner of the room with a rich, steady rumble.

“You _fixed_ it!” she cried, almost accusing. Otto twinkled at her from behind the wheel.

“I suppose we both did.”

A warm, curious weight settled in Gaby’s chest. She was old enough to know she hadn’t _really_ solved anything—certainly she couldn’t have without instruction—and yet she also knew, technically, it was true. The engine worked because of something _she_ had done.

Her palms tingled with power and importance.

“Can we fix another?” she asked, breathless. Otto killed the engine and watched her, considering. She couldn’t have known that he was seeing for the first time a fierce little spark which had been hers for years before the disappearance of her father and the death of her mother in the final bombing of Berlin.

Now the spark was back, and Otto was mechanic enough to want to kindle it to full strength once more.

“Yes,” he said, “all right then.”

They spent the rest of the day together, bent over a succession of greasy, puffing projects. He would assemble a motor under Gaby’s scrutiny and instruct her in the purpose of each part. Next he would remove parts and challenge her in the reassembly of it.

She did badly, most times, but every time she failed he would correct her error and explain it. By the end of the day she could at least recognise and repair the most obvious errors, and when Otto did not lavish meaningless praise on her, when he said only "yes, that's right," she glowed from somewhere deep within.

They returned to the apartment covered in black up to their elbows and smeared about the face with grease.

“Gabriella will be helping me in the garage, Mother,” Otto announced. Maria took one look at Gaby’s face, registered the change there that had nothing to do with oil and petrol, and nodded.

“Good,” she said. “Now eat.”

Gaby’s memories of them later in life would be largely centred around the garage and the kitchen table. She never fully regained the soft rolls and curves of babyhood, but thanks to their combined efforts she lost most of the pinched look she’d had on her arrival. She knew she owed the change in equal parts to Maria’s aggressive, sometimes illegal sourcing of ingredients for her _Eintopf_ and Otto’s instruction on the function of the combustion engine. Together the Schmidts filled up parts of her that were empty, and though she was never completely the same shape, inside or out, as she had been in her earliest childhood, she at least was no longer in danger of starving to death or hungering after something that was forever lost.

The last piece of her childhood supplied by her second set of parents was the ballet training, and although this did not fill anything, it did fuel her.

Just before her tenth birthday Gaby had mentioned offhandedly that this was a thing she had done as a small girl. It wasn’t _serious_ work of course; it could have been, but Mutti had not meant it to be such. She saw ballet as a thing a little girl should do, along with piano and some riding instruction on a fat little pony in the country.

Maria had no piano or access to a pony, but she did have a neighbour who sat on the board at the Berlin Ballet School. She pointed this out to Otto, who said only “well Mother, do as you must.”

So on Monday night Gaby was pushed under cold water and scrubbed within an inch of her life. Maria brushed out her hair, decried its limpness and fine texture, and bound it all up in strips of rag in a desperate effort to thwart both. She warned Gaby it would mean a switching for every one that fell out overnight, so Gaby did not sleep. She laid flat on her back, board stiff, terrified to move and cost herself a rag. The next morning she stood bleary-eyed before the mirror as they were combed out into a painful frizz and carefully reshaped into smooth, shining curls.

Maria dressed them both in their Sunday best. For Gaby this was not so bad, a heavy dark dress with snowy white cuffs and bright brass buttons that ran in two smart lines down her chest. With the weight of the dress settled on her and soft curls floating around her ears, Gaby thought this was how a tree must feel, all deep roots and leafy branches. Maria tied a red ribbon around the little girl’s head, and said she looked bright as a new penny. Gaby glowed.

For Maria, Sunday best meant a girdle and a shiny dress that you were supposed to imagine was satin, though actually it was only a cheaper type of rayon. Gaby, studying the rigidly-corseted, glistening volume of her foster mother, felt she had got the better deal by far. She did not even complain that her best shoes were beginning to pinch around the toe.

Dressed for battle, Maria marched them down the road to the home of Frau Bader where they were invited to sit on stiff horsehair furniture in a narrow front parlour that smelled of cabbage and onion. Maria made awkward small talk and Gaby, who understood her role in all this, didn’t speak a word. All afternoon she watched Maria cast herself on the mercy of a woman who looked as though she had none, and the result was an audition for Gaby.

She got in.

Gaby never once mistook Maria’s efforts over the ballet school as being motivated by a desire for Gaby’s enjoyment. Maria wasn’t like that: it wasn’t about finding what Gaby liked, but what she needed. Since ballet was something Gaby should have had as her birthright, Maria had taken it on as her duty to ensure she got it.

The school was good. When it came to additional expenses associated with her position there, Gaby knew, vaguely, that her mother’s brother had something to do with meeting those, much the same way that he had something to do with where much of their food came from. The Schmidts never spoke of it directly, so Gaby didn’t either. In any event Gaby was less conscious of gratitude to her uncle than she was of her duty to Maria, who had not been _required_ to do this yet had expended every available effort to get Gaby her spot. It was in Maria’s honour that Gaby bent her every effort to dance.

She built muscle and learned the beauty that lay in executing steps with mathematical precision. Though she never grew to the full height of her classmates, her knowledge of her smaller stature fed a manic drive to succeed, to prove herself equally capable, in such a way that she was bound to excel.

Her instructors gave good reports of her to Maria, who presented herself at the duly appointed time to receive them.

“She is a hard worker?” Maria would ask anxiously. “She is a good listener? Respectful?”

The instructors assured Maria that Gaby was all of these things, and more besides. Maria did not care about the _more_ so much, but Gaby _was_ more, and her teachers promoted that too.

There was a glorious exactness in the rules of the dance. Like the teeth of gears, perfectly aligned, with all the graceful sweep of a truly beautiful chassis. When she danced there were rules, yes, but also freedom within them.

Gaby took to the mix of precision and grace with instinctive pleasure. Her every successful performance, both on stage and in the garage, was laid at the feet of the people who had given her the opportunity to succeed in the first place.

Maria attended every performance save the last. She had meant to defy the orders of her doctor, but in the end her strength was unequal even to the task of surviving to see it.

Gaby did not consider skipping her performance, nor did Otto suggest it. Rather he went in Maria’s place, stiffly buttoned in his own Sunday best, and applauded something he did not understand but knew must be good because he could see the pride Gaby took in it. Gaby would never take pride in anything less than her best, so when he saw her shining face at the end of the piece, he knew it must have been very good indeed.

“Mother would have been a better audience,” he said, by way of congratulations.

“Inge would have been a better soloist,” Gaby replied, by way of acceptance.

“Still,” said Otto.

“Yes, still,” Gaby agreed. “I think I was not so bad.”

“I think you were probably not.”

They walked home together, companionable in silence.

 

* * *

 

Gaby met Alexander Waverly when she was twenty-three. She knew he was an asshole the moment she heard him grind the gears of his shitty little Trabant outside the garage.

Never mind that he was driving a Trabant in the first place: she would never hold _that_ against a person, since so many people in the region didn’t have a choice. But for all it was a smoke-belching plastic horror of a vehicle, the Trabant took an age to receive after placing an order. It was so hard to get, it sold for more used than it did new. If a man were going to grind the gears of something so precious, that level of disrespect made him worthy of deepest contempt. And if he was going to get out of that too-awful car wearing a too-nice suit, looking around him like he _knew_ the car was awful—like he was too good to drive it—well then to hell with him. Who did he think he was, anyway?

“Just who do you think you are?” she demanded, striding out to meet him.

He nodded, pleased, as if she had answered a question rather than asked it.

“Ah yes. About that.” He looked around carefully, then extended a hand back toward the garage as though it were his to invite her to enter. “Might we have a word?”

The word Gaby had in mind for him did not change, even after he’d explained himself. She did not actually use her word for him in his hearing, though she called him several others, starting with “liar” when he introduced himself, in very English-sounding German, as the commander of British Naval Intelligence seeking to recruit her.

He took the accusation of dishonesty as easily in stride as one would a compliment.

“I assure you Miss Teller, I could not be more truthful if I tried.”

“Why would you try to be truthful? You are a spy.”

“Then you believe me.”

She shrugged. “I believe you are a spy or an idiot.”

“Not a terribly flattering pair of choices.”

“I don’t have to flatter you. _You_ want something from _me_.”

“Ah.” He appeared to consider this. “Should _I_ try to flatter _you_?”

“It wouldn’t work.”

“No, probably not.” He appraised the garage interior at a glance. She saw him do it: view and assess the whole of her world in a moment’s study. He did it so swiftly, so expertly, that she could no longer doubt his claim of training.

All right. So he was a spy. That didn’t mean she had to work for him.

“You have come here to tell me that my father has disappeared. That he should be found, and I may be the one who can help you do it. Well, Mr. Spy Commander, what makes you think I _want_ to find him?”

“Don’t you?”

“You tell me that my father left me here,” she waved at the garage, “when I was only a girl, and he made another life for himself. He is _comfortable_. Has always been comfortable. And me . . . I have not been comfortable since I was a child.”

She studied the garage as though she did not already know it by heart.

“I watched his wife, my mother, die under a brick wall. I buried a woman who gave me the home and the opportunities she would have given her own child. And two years ago I buried a man who gave me his name and everything he had in this world. Gave me my future as . . . this.”

She waved her hand at the garage again, this time with such furious, pointed meaning that it forced him to look again; to see it for what it really was.

“What did my other father give me, but the chance to starve with my mother if she had not been killed?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Waverly seemed to take it as more than that.

“Well, he appears to have given you an absolutely first-class brain. And if you won’t help us out of affection for him, perhaps you would be willing to help in exchange for the chance to leave.”

“Leave East Berlin?” she shrugged again. “This was your offer. You made it already, but that is something I don’t need you for. Leaving is difficult, yes, but it can be done. It does not take a spy.”

“Well,” he said, “not yet.”

He took one more look around the garage.

“Let’s say we give it a day or two, shall we? Sleep on it?” He tapped the bonnet of the nearest car. “Think it over.”

Then he sauntered out of the garage, tossing a cheery wave over his shoulder.

“Pleasure meeting you, Miss Teller. We’ll be in touch.”

He ground the gears again as he drove away, and Gaby set her teeth on edge.

 _Asshole_.

Two nights later, a dreadful clattering woke Gaby from a deep sleep. She put her head out the window and watched a steady parade of lights trail down a nearby street, heading toward the western border. What in the world . . ?

For a moment she was tempted to investigate on the spot, but then common sense fought through the remnants of sleep to lay hold and give her head a shake. Morning, she decided, was soon enough to go charging after strange lights, army motors and the sound of marching boots.

Such things did not disappear overnight.

The next day everyone trickled down to stare at it, a twisting barbed-wire scar cut through an already battle-ravaged city. They could not get too close: the guards warned them off, and when people would not listen, they were ordered away at gunpoint.

Gaby did not test them to that extreme. She stood to the back of the crowd and studied the wall as Alexander Waverly’s words of two days earlier played through her head: _Well. Not yet._

Had he known, then? But of course he had. He was a spy, after all.

Her arm was jostled by somebody in the crowd. She thought nothing of it until she realised she was holding the wrapper of a snack she had not eaten. Unfolding it, she read the message written on the inside.

_Change of heart?_

She pursed her lips and clenched her fist around the wrapper. Then, reluctantly, she flattened it out again, smoothing the creases away from the numbers pencilled at the bottom.

A telephone number.

Very well then. She tucked the wrapper in the pocket of her overall and started down a different road, toward the public phone.

He was _still_ an asshole, but no good would come of denying his usefulness.

 _Arschloch_.

She wondered how you said it in English.

She supposed she’d have to learn.

 

* * *

 

In the two years that followed Alexander Waverly’s visit to the garage, improvements were made. Slowly, yes, and in such a way that people who did not look too closely would have no reason to question them, but they happened all the same.

New people were hired. New engine parts became more readily available. Sometimes a parcel or message would arrive and it would be Gaby’s responsibility to determine a way to conceal these so they could continue their journey.

She sourced a Wartburg and got to work modifying the engine from its unimaginative birthright to something with a little more get-up-and-go, partly in anticipation of a day she might need it, and partly for the satisfaction of the thing.

Still, the contact that Waverly had promised would come . . . did not.

Not for years.

Then one night Napoleon Solo walked through the door of the garage as if _he_ owned it, and although he showed more respect for her car than Waverly had shown his, she was not exactly won over.

It took the looming threat of the KGB to accomplish that.

 

* * *

 

The looming threat of the KGB was setting Gaby’s nerves on edge.

“ _Must_ you stand so close?” she wondered, and waved a wrench in vague warning.

She didn’t have to see Illya’s face to know there was a grimace on it. But then, there had been a grimace on his face since all three of them arrived in Monte Carlo the week before, Solo and Gaby in the role of a bored young couple with more money than common sense, Illya posing as their driver.

“This is not a good idea,” he warned. “You are supposed to be a woman of high society, not—not _mechanic_. You risk our cover.”

“I think I risk a lot more than that, if I’m found tampering with a Lotus two hours before the race. Hand me that clamp, would you?”

The requested part appeared in her line of sight, though the very fingers that held it seemed to radiate disapproval at the entire arrangement. She took it, smiled at the disapproving knuckles, and applied her wrench again.

Illya shifted restlessly against the panels.

“It should not be you who is doing this,” he muttered. “It should be your driver.”

“And if my driver knew how to lay the charge so it would not affect the steering until it was meant to, then it would be my driver. But he does not, and so he keeps lookout.”

Illya grumbled softly.

“Besides,” she reasoned, clamping the detonator neatly in place, “it isn’t as though I would be any less conspicuous keeping lookout. At least this way if someone looks in from the street they will only see you.” She tested the security of the clamp. “You, and your scowl.”

“I do _not_ have scowl.”

Gaby smiled at the clamp.

“No?”

“No. This is a neutral expression.”

“Well. Maybe in _Russia_.”

His next grumble was more pronounced.

“Keep that up,” she warned, “and I’ll be tempted to check _your_ engine.”

“How long can this take? You said ‘five more minutes’ ten minutes ago. I think you are—”

“Done!”

She scooted out from under the car with a clatter of wheels. Illya’s foot shot out instinctively to stop the dolly rolling all the way across the garage.

“Help me up?” She extended a hand. He hauled her to her feet with such vigour she nearly followed the arrested path of the dolly, but steadied herself with an effort and made a snippy little face of her own.

“Now this won’t do at all. You are in a temper,” she scolded. “One look at the look you are giving me, and they’ll know something is wrong.”

Illya seethed with all the muted fury of a plugged volcano.

“I am _not_ in a—”

The completion of his denial died with the rattle of a key in the lock. Gaby and Illya snapped around as one to register the silhouette of a man in the grimy panes of glass at the door; as one, again, they flew across the floor to the only other available door. Beyond it lay a niche in the wall barely deserving of the name cupboard, but this was not the time to get finicky about hiding spots.

Faster than should have been possible, Illya folded the entirety of his frame into the tiny cavity beyond. Then he extended an arm and folded Gaby into himself and she pulled the door shut behind them.

They waited in black, breathless nothingness as the door across the garage opened. A rattle, a clatter and then florid curses filtered through the warped wood of the door panels to fill the space.

“Damn Michel, he left the dolly out again! Nearly broke my neck.”

“Never mind it now. Come on, bring the car. We’re already behind schedule.”

The rumble of the engine turning over filled every corner of the garage. It rattled Gaby’s teeth until she buried her face in Illya’s shoulder, and he, already pressed for space beyond endurance, shuffled desperately under the cover of the noise to lift her up, off the ground and brace her against his midsection so he could straighten his back and bend his knees.

His sigh of relief at the change in posture ruffled her hair and warmed the back of her neck.

Warmed the rest of her, too.

As if the day weren’t complicated enough as it was.

Even after the rumble of the engine died away, they didn’t move. Voices filtered in from just beyond the garage door, faint, but unmistakable.

“We wait,” he whispered, the shape of the words lifting the hairs above her ear.

“Mmm,” she nodded her agreement.

They waited.

Still the voices persisted, not even near enough for them to make out words, but near enough they could both be sure of discovery if they tried to leave now.

As still as they both tried to be, Gaby was aware that Illya’s breathing pattern had altered. His breath came quicker now, and each inhalation seemed shallow.

“Are you all right?”

He made a soft, strangled noise in reply.

“I think,” he added after a moment, “we are safe to . . . speak. A little. Quietly. Of something.”

Another pause. Then, more urgently, “ _anything_.”

She didn’t ask questions. Didn’t need to know if the closeness of the closet was what was affecting him or rather if he, like she, was rather overcome by the closeness of something a little more human. She only knew he needed a distraction, and so she gave it, gladly.

“When I first saw you,” she recalled, “you were driving a Trabant. You remember?”

He made a motion that might have been a nod, aborted by the clunk of his skull against the ceiling. “Yes. Terrible car.”

“It is. But you did not treat it badly.”

“Of course not.” Even in the hushed monotone of a whisper she could hear his confusion. “Why should I?”

“Just so,” Gaby murmured. “Why should you.”

His hand was pressed to the small of her back, balancing her hips against his. She braced one knee on each side of him to ease the burning in her calves, and kept talking.

“I still remember the first car I saw on the other side of the wall. It was a Borgward Isabella.” She drew her tongue lovingly around the words. “Do you know it?”

“Yes. No. A—a little.”

“It’s a wonderful car. Performance and beauty, all in one. When I saw it that night, even parked . . . I don’t know. It was like a promise that where I was going would be better than everywhere I had been.”

He made a sound that might have once meant intended as an invitational “yes?” but only came out a thin, agonised gasp.

Gaby lifted her face to search out the murky edges of his.

“Illya . . .”

It was equal parts uncertainty and invitation.

He answered the invitation without a trace of uncertainty, capturing her top lip as though it were the one thing in the wretched, cramped little cell that he _could_ see.

As though he saw it every time he closed his eyes, and had no need of any lamp to find it now.

Gaby’s dress was silk, soft and fine as cotton, but all at once it was chafing every part of her and she longed to strip it off entirely.

“Maybe—” she said, but never got to finish.

The door to the cupboard was yanked open without ceremony. They did not tumble out, since they were too interlocked to budge. Instead they blinked owlishly at the too-bright glare of the garage and the disapproving glare of Napoleon Solo.

“Well,” he said. “This isn't quite the rescue mission I had envisioned when you didn’t show up. Now if you two have finished making a mockery of the sanctity of our marriage, I do believe we have a train to catch.”

 

* * *

 

They were long gone by the time the charge went off beneath the steering column. It detonated just as it was meant to, at the moment it was meant to. The car spun out of control and skidded through a wall of hay bales to plunge into the harbour. The driver was pulled clear and the car sank with nobody the wiser.

That act of sabotage, Waverly assured them, was the final link in a long and complicated chain of informants, reaching all the way from Istanbul to . . .

“Argentina?” Solo repeated at their next briefing, as though quite certain he must have misheard. “What in God’s name is in _Argentina_?”

 

* * *

 

The jungles of Argentina were teeming with Nazis, if you could believe the papers these days.

“Can you _believe_ the papers these days?” Solo wondered, waving one in Gaby’s face. “This one says you are the wealthy widow of a Cuban coffee baron, out to spend all his money on drugs, gambling and very expensive young men.”

“I think you have answered your own question,” she decided.

“Perhaps I have. But I distinctly remember putting out the rumour that you were looking to spend money on men, gold and jewelry. It won’t be much use to us if _this_ is the story that catches. We need the men _and_ the gold bit to ensure we smoke out Franz Stoessel.”

“Maybe you should have a word with your contact, then.”

“Maybe I will.” He peered over the edge of his paper at his travelling companion, sleek and chic in pale linen as she reclined against the seat of the airliner. “Do you _know_ how to gamble?”

“Well enough to lose.”

He nodded, satisfied, and went back to his paper.

Gaby turned the page of her own magazine, drinking in every detail of the glossy fashion spread on the facing sheet. “I think we will need to refresh my wardrobe if I am to pass as a woman who can afford an expensive vice of any kind. Everything is out of date by now.”

“A classic never dies, Gaby.”

“But covers do, if they are not believable.” She scanned the next few pages without comment, then sighed. “I suppose I could try to fix the sleeves myself. But I can’t sew very well, so it might be a bad idea.”

“Why? What’s wrong with the sleeves?”

“The cut is off,” she frowned, and showed him. “I don’t know who thought _that_ look was a good idea, but it seems to be coming into vogue. If I’m going to appeal to anyone looking to offload Nazi gold and jewels, including Franz Stoessel, I will need to look like I can afford to buy them.”

“All right,” he snapped his paper shut, “I’ll make some calls when we land.”

Solo was as good as his word, lining up appointments in six boutiques that he promised would furnish the necessaries. To her disappointment the first shop had very little that caught her interest, so Gaby moved on to the next.

The second shop had Ernst Schertz.

She didn’t know him at first. The proprietor who greeted her was a grown man, long and lean, with more nose, ears and chin than his fair share. He had long fingers that he displayed to worst advantage when he invited her to sign the register. His face pulled into a thoughtful expression as he read her name aloud. Even then she didn’t know him, but he reread her name with every evidence of joyful recognition.

“Not Gabriella Teller!” Then, seeing her confusion, he rushed to re-introduce himself. “It’s Ernie! You remember, Ernst Schertz, from . . . home. _Do_ you remember? Our fathers did work together before—” he stumbled only a little over the timeframe, gamely concluding, “before we left.”

His smile persisted as he advanced toward her, hands outstretched, searching her face for signs of recognition.

“You do remember, don’t you, Gaby?”

Yes, of course she remembered. The question was, what to do about it.

She cycled rapidly through a list of possible options. Claim mistaken identity seemed the most obvious choice, yet he was so certain, so _loud_ in his certainty—two other patrons had already looked in their direction—that she knew it would be unwise. So she smiled as well, though rather less gamely, said “Ernst! Of course,” and tilted her cheek for his kiss.

“But what brings you to Buenos Aires, Gaby? I didn’t know you lived in Argentina now . . . though,” he smiled shyly, “who among us doesn’t, these days?”

Oh.

Oh, _no_.

He thought she was . . . _but steady on_ , she could almost hear Solo speaking in her ear, _turn this to our advantage. Make it work_.

“I arrived only recently,” she said calmly. “You may have heard that my father died not that long ago. He left me the means to travel and I chose to travel here.”

Whether or not she sold the bit, she couldn’t say. She knew only that he bought it.

“This is the most remarkable coincidence you know,” Ernst said, some fifteen minutes later. He had turned possession of the shop counter over to a senior clerk and insisted on squiring her about Buenos Aires personally. She’d only had time to ensure she caught Solo’s eye as she left the shop before Ernst handed her into a blue boat of a Cadillac—and how the hell he’d come by _that_ , she was determined not to ask—and given his driver instructions to take them around.

“Is it?” she asked faintly.

“Yes. You know, you are the _fifth_ new arrival from home this year? The rest were all family, but . . . well, you’re kind of family too, aren’t you? I’ve known you forever.”

During their drive, Gaby relearned what she already knew: you could not trust the papers these days. The jungles of Argentina were _not_ teeming with Nazis, because Nazis had no need of the jungle. They lived openly in the cities (though not, perhaps, _quite_ as openly as they had done before the deposition of Péron) and went about their business without much fear of repercussion.

“When they got Eichmann it gave us all a turn,” Ernst admitted, “but he was a special case of course. And plenty of us are doing just fine. I’ve got that shop, myself, and Papa has investments. He arrived a little after us, around the same time as Commander Kuhlmann.” The car drew up before the hotel whose name Gaby had given. “It was Kuhlmann who secured August’s position in the firm.”

“Oh,” Gaby said, “August is here too?”

“All of us are. The whole family. And now you are, too! Gaby, you’ve got to come to dinner this week. My mother would never forgive me if I didn’t ask. Please say you’ll come.”

Gaby murmured something polite and agreeable, and escaped the Cadillac for the safety of the hotel.

Twenty minutes later, she was wondering how to escape _from_ the safety of the hotel.

“This couldn’t be better if we’d planned it, Gaby,” Solo said earnestly. “Your old pal Ernst is actually a family connection of the man we’re here to find.”

“He is _not_ my—”

“So it’s settled!” Solo concluded. “You confirm the engagement, Peril here will monitor everything from a nice safe distance—”

Illya, who had arrived in the country two days earlier and seemed to resent the additional time he’d spent there, merely growled.

“—and it’s all set. You get in that house and find out where they keep their Uncle Franz. Then we’ll retrieve him and be away to the port before you can say knife.”

Often in their line of work, such instructions fell under the category of ‘easier said than done’. Not so this time. Illya fitted her with a necklace that would allow him to overhear everything, Solo fitted her with descriptions of Franz Stoessel and a variety of missing artwork that might be in the villa (“just keep a look out, that’s all I’m asking”) and they were set.

Gaby’s initial fear—that Waverly, on learning of her connection to the Schertz family, would insist she stay longer and use her position to uncover more Nazi war criminals—had proved unfounded. It turned out nobody much cared about Nazi war criminals unless they were going to be especially useful or particularly embarrassing, and most of those in Argentina were neither.

Franz Stoessel was a rare exception. He had already been promised as one side’s part of a trade with another country; a country that was particularly eager to get their hands on him, though whether or not he would live to see trial there was another matter entirely.

Four nights after running into Ernst in his boutique, Gaby walked right up the steps of the Schertz family villa, shimmering expensively in dark blue silk that had come from Ernst’s own shop. She was hailed in genuine welcome by her own name, by people who knew exactly who she was.

Well. _Almost_ exactly.

They thought she was one of them.

August reached her first. He had grown up exactly as she had imagined he would: tall, muscular, with all the strength and regular proportion of limb that seemed to have passed over his brother. He bent to clasp her hands and smile with every appearance of genuine delight.

“You can’t imagine how surprised we were,” he confided, “to learn you’d made it here. I was sorry to hear of your father, but what of your mother? And your uncle? Are they both well?”

Gaby was spared having to answer by Frau Schertz, who cut her neatly from August’s audience with words of fond welcome; something about remembering little Gaby from her days in plaits and scraped knees.

“You kept up with both of my boys,” she recalled, and pressed a cheek to each of Gaby’s. “Now tell me honestly: do you remember your dear Aunt Lilli?”

Gaby recalled, dimly, a particular friend of Mutti’s with a heart-shaped face and Cupid’s-bow lips; careful waves of platinum-blonde hair that had winked with diamonds at those few grand suppers when every family gathered around a grand table in the manor hall.

More recently she remembered Solo’s chilly debriefing: the list of artwork and jewelry this woman had helped herself to from vast storehouses across Europe as she travelled with her husband, who was occupied with perfecting the design of a collapsible gas chamber.

Two years of practice since Rome meant Gaby’s smile came easier than it should have.

“Of course I remember you, Aunt Lilli. You gave me butterscotch candy.”

The heart-shaped face broke into sunny smiles, and Gaby’s cheek was patted with real warmth.

“Our Gaby!” she declared firmly, and Gaby’s stomach stirred uncomfortably at the words.

During the meal, conversation focused mostly on old times. Over the first course they remembered how August had evinced such natural leadership, marshalling all of the children beneath him.

“If things had gone differently for us,” Aunt Lilli predicted, “he would have risen to great prominence in the army.”

“Are you in the army here?” Gaby wondered, though she already knew the answer both from Ernst’s vague reference and Solo’s more thorough rundown.

“I am a man of business,” August corrected her cheerfully.

“And he is doing _very_ well,” Aunt Lilli said proudly.

Gaby’s smile settled on her face like a shy, polished mask of approbation. She listened and nodded her way through the first course, then the next. When asked she gave the truest account of herself that she could muster: caught behind the wall, she had been got over it by sympathetic parties. She had reunited with her father and Uncle Rudi before they passed. Now she meant to travel and enjoy herself.

“But will you stay in Argentina?” August pressed. “There are not many places that are safe for us, you know, but this is one of them.”

“I haven’t decided.”

“Well at least you must stay for the weekend!” Aunt Lilli declared. “I will not hear no for an answer. We will send somebody back to town for your things, of course. You must say yes, Gaby, we would love to have you.”

Gaby, for want of a handy excuse, said yes. Let Illya hear it all through the bug in her necklace, she decided, and sort it out on that end.

It was during the dessert course that conversation again came round to the childhood they had spent together, a summer that both August and Ernst seemed to recall as fondly as Gaby once had; as, she was increasingly certain, she would never be able to do again.

“Remember the games we had?” August prompted. “Such a lot of fun. Races . . . I think you even won a few, didn’t you, Gaby?”

“One,” Gaby murmured.

“Well, more than Ernst, anyway!” August laughed. Ernst, who had been silent for most of the meal, smiled too, though rather more tightly than his brother.

Gaby, conscious of some inconvenient stirrings of pity, quickly nudged the topic down a different path.

“Yes, and do you remember all the toys? It was like Paradise to me. I had never seen so many. Somebody must have bought out an entire toy shop for our use.”

August chuckled at this suggestion, and Ernst smiled a little more warmly.

“Hardly that.”

Gaby blinked, looking from one brother to the other.

“Then . . .”

“Gaby,” Ernst said patiently, “they had _initials_ on them.”

Gaby, in the act of raising her glass to her lips, faltered.

“What?”

“The toys. Don’t you remember? The cars, mostly, and those planes . . . the ones August was so fond of. They all had initials scratched on them.” He took a bite of his cake. “D.R. Every one of them. Didn’t you wonder why?”

Gaby’s hand started to shake. She quickly set the glass aside and hid her fingers in the lap of her dress.

“Didn’t you wonder why?” Ernst repeated. “Why there were so many toys . . . why that house was so full of furniture, so ready for all of us, but so empty of people to live in it? Didn’t you wonder at all?”

The walls were pressing in, as though the thing he was hinting at, the monstrous evil, were somehow all her doing and he was finding her out.

“I was five,” she whispered, but whether it was an explanation or defence, even she couldn't tell.

“Yes, and I was eight,” he laughed. “But we weren’t ever innocent little kiddies, were we? Playing with those toys while our Papas did their work. Climbing all over the cars, when the family that had owned them was . . . well.” He gave a little shrug, as if the fate of the family were of so little consequence it didn’t bear mentioning.

“We were children,” she said sharply, then modulated her tone to prevent their being overheard. “You can’t hold children accountable for—for such things.”

“No?” He blinked at her, then shrugged. “Well. Maybe not. But _they’d_ get us all for it, if they could.” And he took a deep, greedy draught of his port.

Gaby moved a cake crumb from one side of the plate to the other, conscious of a new hollow deep within her. She wondered how to learn the whereabouts of Uncle Franz.

August helped her there. He showed her around after dinner, and it was all Gaby could do to focus on her responsibility: to process what he was saying and nod as though she found it anything other than revolting.

“. . . and the second wing we remodelled after Uncle Franz joined us. Vater insisted. Can’t have a hero of the Third Reich slumming it like a poor relation, he said! And damn right he was.”

He smiled boyishly at her, and she remembered with painful clarity that confidence, that surety. She saw what she had seen even as a child: the casual magnetism of him.

He was going to be blazingly successful here. And why not? He had been a child himself when the war ended. Never _directly_ responsible, just like her.

But it was hard to use that reminder to moderate her temper as he kept showing her pieces of art whose provenance, Gaby knew from Solo’s instruction, was the storehouses of Europe.

“A little Caravaggio Mutti picked up in Spain,” he said casually, “on our way here.”

The whole family had used the ratlines to escape in the last days of the war. They’d had more time to prepare than those who waited until after, and Solo had been meticulous in detailing their route; detailing the treasures they smuggled out even before the war ended, as well as after.

Solo held no dim view of smugglers, of course. He had reported their success to her with clinical detachment, listing every work of art the Schertz family had been known to acquire. But his list, it turned out, had not been complete. Gaby had been given no preparation for the piece August showed her next, his face glowing with real pride as he took it down from a shelf in the corridor: a gleaming tin plane, a real model of workmanship for its time, with the initials D.R. scratched on the fuselage.

“I brought this one with us. My favourite, you know? Didn’t seem right to leave it behind. Not with so many happy memories there. Of course,” he laughed, “I brought a few larger toys over since then. But no rush; you can see those on your next trip out.”

Gaby took the toy he offered so easily, and remembered a time that he would not have shared it without a fight. She remembered the races they had run for it, and her own narrow victory against Ernst; the rush of pride that had followed.

Tamping down the cloud of emotion she turned it over and stared at the crude little claim of ownership some child had made over two decades earlier. She touched each initial lightly; curious.

“Who do you think he was? The little boy?”

August shrugged. “Who cares?”

Well. If the inconvenient, choking rage that rose in her throat at those words was any sort of indicator . . . Gaby did.

 

* * *

 

Solo came back from town with Gaby’s things, but he waited until it was dark to unfold himself from the luggage compartment, stretch out his legs and take a look around.

Gaby was not hard to find. She had left her light on, and since the arrival of her case had added an outfit of neat, dark day clothes beneath a rather more luxurious peignoir. She cast off the robe the moment Solo vaulted over her balcony. As far as she was concerned, they couldn’t leave quickly enough.

“Peril’s waiting for us down the road,” he announced, “and I think we’re already late. Which way to Uncle Franz?”

Once he had confirmed the direction of Uncle Franz’s wing, he told Gaby to meet him in the carriage house. “See if you can’t find some kind of cart to put him in, will you? I don’t look forward to our lugging him all the way down to the car.”

The carriage house was behind the main villa, with a gate that opened to the back. Gaby had seen it from the terrace during her tour and it took her only two tries to get the lock open. Once inside she started poking around for some kind of luggage cart—if they entertained as often as they seemed to, _surely_ they must have a luggage cart—but stopped, midsearch, at the sight of the auto parked along the far wall.

Logic told her she could not be seeing what her mind said she was.

It was the car. _The_ car, from the garage of their childhood. The one that August had claimed for his own machine when she acted as his assistant in the repair of it.

August’s casual boast filtered back to her from earlier that night: _I brought a few larger toys over since then_.

Of course he had.

She did not even realise she had picked up the crowbar until it shattered the headlamp, spitting shards of glass back into her hair, onto the soft, fine knit of her jumper. She stood, blinking a moment, then abruptly swung again.

And again.

And over and over and over again until everything was a blur of sparks and glass and pipes torn loose and shredded leather and . . . ruin. Utter, irretrievable ruin.

She had started to cry at some point during the assault. She didn’t hear her own sobs but felt them in the way her lungs grabbed for air, the burn of her throat and the way her vision blurred with tears.

Then, through the haze, came a voice.

“Gaby—Gaby— _Gabriella_!” Solo caught her round the waist and pulled her off the dented shambles. “That’s enough.”

“It’s—no, it’s not . . .” she twisted once, twice, then hung limp.

He set her down carefully and frowned, clearly not thinking much of her ability to walk out of the garage like nothing was wrong.

He was probably right.

“Gaby, we’ve got to go. And . . .” he looked over her shoulder, “seeing as you appear to have destroyed what would have been a _very_ handy way out of here, we had better start walking. We’ll each take one end,” he concluded, and indicated the tightly-wrapped bundle of Uncle Franz, which she had not noticed before.

He looked like a larva in its pupal state, bound up entirely in his own bedsheet and limp from whatever cocktail Solo had given him to make him amenable to being wrapped.

“I can’t.”

“You can’t . . . because you are injured?” Solo made a show of checking her for wounds. She shook her head.

“That car . . . it was there, when we were children. Just like the toys.”

Solo put up an eyebrow.

“I’m sorry: _toys_?”

Gaby nodded miserably.

“When I was five,” she said, “we spent the summer in the country . . .”

She told the story piecemeal, and badly. Blathered about the summer she met the Schertz brothers, most of which he’d already heard, then skipped right from the estate to after the war with her foster parents. She told him about Otto and the garage, then, because she felt strangely disloyal to the memory of Maria after focusing so much on Otto, told him about the ballet, too.

Told him about Waverly, and the poor abused Trabant.

Then she told him about rigging the car with Illya, in Monte Carlo . . . and why the hell she felt the need to bring that into it, she’d probably never know. Except somehow it fit with the rest: it was who she was and what she’d become, all thanks to August playing a stupid game with a dead family’s car when she was a little girl.

“So you see?” she finished, heartsick. “I am myself—who I am today—because _they were dead_.”

Solo blinked rapidly, then squinted, as if she had relayed the whole story in one of the languages he _didn’t_ speak.

“Gabriella, you were _five_ ,” he said firmly; almost as if she were five still, and needed nothing more than a little steadying of the nerves before bed. “You were five, and it was not your fault.”

At least now that he was lecturing he had stopped checking her for wounds.

“You are _not_ who you are because of August Schertz. You are _not_ your . .  . family.”

“How can you be so sure I am not? Two years ago, when we . . . when you . . . what my uncle did to you because of what I said. That—”

“That is one of the risks of our occupation. You had a job to do and you did what was necessary to complete it. I should know all about that, don’t you think?”

“Oh so in my place, you would have done the same?”

He looked away at that, though less in the manner of one evading than a man reflecting. After a moment’s consideration he met her gaze directly.

“I don’t know. And if it’s all the same to you I’d rather not find out, but we might be obliged to if we stay here any longer.” He kept a hand beneath her elbow, grounding her as he gestured toward the door. “It’s a long walk to the port. We might as well get started.”

She let him steer her toward the door and the bundle of Uncle Franz, but her attention was arrested en route by a glint of light in the far corner.

“Is that . . .” she veered away into the gloom. She didn’t need to look back to know Solo was giving her that particular look he saved for screaming babies on trams, and restaurants incapable of properly pairing their wines. She supposed he was just about fed up with her, but she didn’t care.

Because August hadn’t warehoused just one car from their childhood. He had brought them both.

“Come on,” she said. “We’ll use this one. Illya will be waiting.”

 

* * *

 

Illya _was_ waiting. Not only was he waiting, he was positively bristling with equipment bags and nasty temper at their late arrival.

“You said three o’clock,” he fumed, climbing into the seat beside Gaby. “It is _not_ —”

“We were unavoidably detained,” Solo said calmly. There was nothing in his voice to suggest anything keener than supreme disinterest in the matter at hand, but Illya looked back sharply all the same.

“You had trouble?”

“Now, I didn’t say that.”

“No, you said three o’clock. And by _my_ watch, it—”

“Peril, it’s pitch black out. How can you possibly see your watch?”

“Maybe my eyesight is better than yours.”

“Oh? How many fingers am I holding up?”

It was just one, and neither Illya or Gaby had to look to guess which one it was.

“You are like _child_.”

“Mother,” Solo appealed to Gaby, “Father does _scold_ , doesn’t he?”

“Will the two of you hush?” she scolded, with a sharpness she could not quite mean. Her heart already felt lighter; cleaner. Being with them had that effect on her these days.

“How long before they notice it’s gone, d’you think?” Napoleon wondered. He ran his hand over the back seat. “It’s a remarkably comfortable car.”

“Long enough,” Gaby decided. It was a _Mother_ type of answer, but she meant it. She could get them to the port before they were overtaken; she had no doubt of it.

“The ship is waiting,” Illya put in, as if to lend support to her answer. “I have confirmed it. They know we are bringing Stoessel.”

“The car, too,” Gaby added. “We have to bring the car.”

Neither of her partners asked what she meant, but she wanted to explain herself anyway.

“I want to take it back with us. I don’t know if we could ever trace the original owner or whatever is left of his family, but it _is_ valuable. It could at least be sold, don’t you think? The money used to . . . to help.”

“Now, I think that’s a splendid idea,” Solo decided. “Peril? Know any Russian billionaires looking to acquire a machine like this?”

Illya smiled.

“Maybe a few.”                                                                                        

“Hmm. Me too, come to think of it. We should make some calls.”

Gaby let the back-and-forth wash over her as she drove, drawing equal parts comfort from the passage of the car and her company within it.

Illya sat beside her, solid and tall. She knew that if ever she reached for him, the moment she did, his hand would meet hers halfway. Solo lounged behind them, catlike, regal, content to be chauffeured and trusting in her skill to do the job right.

Ahead of them lay the sea and their passage home. Between them and the port there was nothing but open road.

Gaby shifted gear, put her foot down, and smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for the Gaby prompts! Your mechanical prompt grabbed hold of me immediately, which I found a little funny since I can't really claim much of a background in that area. Even so, I absolutely loved what you had to say about her competence there. Thank you for the chance to explore the origins of that, as well as the excuse to dig into a bit of research while I was at it!
> 
> You also mentioned loving her German background, which ended up giving this whole piece most of its shape. At first I thought it would turn into a series of shorter pieces, but they didn't quite stand well enough on their own for that so I kept them all together in the end.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed!


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